Yet rivals Twitter, Facebook and Google went into overtime after the game to pump out tons of statistics hyping how each dominated the social media world of soccer fans.

Twitter said there were 672 million tweets during the tournament. That set a new record for a single event, although the World Cup was spread out over 32 days and 64 matches.

Twitter even created a fun, if self-promotional, highlight reel - a super-Vine, if you will - that shows how the World Cup played out in tweets.

Facebook said 350 million of its members generated 3 billion "interactions," defined as timeline posts, comments and likes.

The Menlo Park company called it "the largest conversation on Facebook for any event in history." That goes back to when Facebook was created in 2004.

The biggest day was for Sunday's Germany-Argentina final, with 88 million people generating 280 million interactions.

Facebook data scientists even came up with an interactive chart showing how the rooting interests of fans changed during the course of the tournament.

Then there was Google, which tracked 2.1 billion World Cup-related searches, including everything from looking for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's soccer ball-shaped handbag to "Did Messi vomit in the World Cup final?"

Facebook, Twitter and Google each have teams of scientists that routinely pour over the deluge of data created by users.

But for the World Cup, Google went one step further and opened an experimental "newsroom" in San Francisco to monitor World Cup activity.

As NPR reported, the newsroom was assigned to turn those search trends into content that could in turn be shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The results were posted on a Google Trends World Cup Page.

But here's the twist: The newsroom chose to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, NPR reported.

For example, while Germany was clobbering Brazil in the semifinals, Google highlighted positive search terms because, as a newsroom producer explained, the company did not want to "rub salt into wounds" and because "a negative story about Brazil won't necessarily get a lot of traction in social."

And this was only a few weeks after Facebook apologized for manipulating people's emotions.